Purpose: “Cyclists are dying, collisions are rising, and people who claim that there is a “War on Cars” are out of control—it’s time for a reality check and an action plan.”

Manifesto (edited)

I. The car-driving class must pay its own way!

For cars we have paved our forests, spanned our lakes, and burrowed under our cities. Yet drivers throw tantrums at the painting of a mere bicycle lane on the street. They balk at the mere suggestion of hiking a car-tab fee, raising the gas tax, or tolling to help pay for their insatiable demands, even as downtrodden transit riders have seen fares rise 80 percent over four years.

No more! We demand that car drivers pay their own way, bearing the full cost of the automobile-petroleum-industrial complex that has depleted our environment, strangled our cities, and drawn our nation into foreign wars. Reinstate the progressive motor vehicle excise tax, hike the gas tax, and toll every freeway, bridge, and neighborhood street until the true cost of driving lies as heavy and noxious as our smog-laden air. Our present system of hidden subsidies is the opiate of the car-driving masses; only when it is totally withdrawn will our road-building addiction finally be broken.

II. All power to the people’s transit

If Seattle is to become a people’s paradise, our buses, rail, streetcars, and ferries must stretch into every neighborhood, running reliably, affordably, and at all hours of the day and night. Since mass transit serves the masses, the mass of our transportation dollars must hereafter be spent to meet its needs.

III. The pedestrian and bicycle classes must be protected. And served!

The history of transportation is the history of struggle between the drivers and the nondrivers whose lives and limbs have literally been crushed…

The bikers and walkers, which neither slurp government dollars nor consume natural resources at the pace of the drivers, demand safer streets and sidewalks. As the Economist suggested on September 3 when responding to Seattle’s spate of recent cyclist deaths, cars on streets with bike lanes must be subjected to “traffic calming” methods already used in European capitals like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Portland. When cars must slow down below 20 miles per hour, they kill less than 5 percent of collision victims. And the busiest bike lanes must be physically protected from the four-wheeled instruments of death through concrete buffers, rows of trees, or other barriers. In some places, whole streets—yes, whole streets, we have plenty to spare—must be closed to cars, creating bike and pedestrian malls and paths of the kind found throughout more forward-thinking, class-conscious cities.

We make these demands because, unfortunately, we must. Our epoch, the epoch of the car, possesses this distinct feature: It has created a simplified antagonism. Seattle as a whole is now more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly fighting each other—car driver and nondriver.

This antagonism traces directly to the creation of the modern car driver, a privileged individual who, as noted, is the beneficiary of a long course of subsidies, tax incentives, and wars for cheap oil. But the same subsidies that created this creature (who now rages about the roads while simultaneously screaming of being a victim in some war) can—and must, beginning now—be used to build bike lanes, sidewalks, light rail, and other benefits to the nondriving classes.

Creator: Asia Pulp & Paper Group (APP), one of the world’s largest pulp and paper producers.

Purpose: Building upon the first Paper Contract in 2008, this upgraded version provides further details on APP-China’s commitment to sustainable practices and future objectives, and calls on all industry players to collaborate to pursue growth in a more sustainable manner.

Manifesto

• To continuously seek and improve sustainable forestry and conservation protection practices in the areas where we operate.

• To contribute to the fight against global warming by implementing measures to conserve energy, reduce emissions, and improve our production capabilities whilst engaging employees to support the company’s environmental initiatives.

• To continue APP-China’s commitment to community empowerment by promoting economic growth, creating job opportunities, investing in infrastructure in rural areas, and building schools where we operate.

• To promote the sharing platform with related stakeholders, including the government, industry associations, academia, NGO, media and other pulp & paper enterprises.

Creator: Trevor Boddy, a former architecture critic for the Vancouver Sun.

Purpose: To kick off the Design Thinking Unconference in Vancouver and to stimulate a health debate around the design of the city of Vancouver.

HybridCity Manifesto (edited)

Vancouver thrives when it embraces its many origins, peoples, ideas and forms. Vancouver falters when it strives for purity, isolation, unity of function. We are a city of hybrids, so integrated they slide into each other as hybridcity. Our metropolitan strength, our urban engine’s power is creative diversity—without it, we become brittle, uncaring and dull.

Inventing hybridcity: This city was invented at the stroke of a pen. In utterly no sense did vancouver evolve organically—as in standard urban narratives, be they of Etruscan Rome or Homer Simpson’s Springfield—but rather conceived in a single business and political contract for the Canadian Pacific Railway …For our hybridcity, I proclaim the Pentecostal potlatch, and celebrate Equinox, eid and easter with bubble tea!

Forgetting and denying hybridcity: …Vancouver will never be at peace until it reconciles with its indigenaity, a cornerstone of hybridcity. Vancouver must also confront its history of apartheid. Early ‘racial zoning’ mandated asians’ residences and businesses to be located in Chinatown’s few blocks, and nowhere else…

Building hybridcity: Vancouver now grows never before-seen hybrids of building forms and types: thin condo high rises set on townhouse podia (a hybrid of mid-levels hong kong with Brooklyn Brownstones); towers laminating office with residential with hotel; four condo skyscrapers erupting up out of a costco; a village for 400 residents set on the roof of a home depot, itself set on a save-on foods…

Hybridcity now: Real estate is Vancouver’s civil religion, and marketers, politicians, developers and planners are the descending ranks of its priestly class. …Vancouverites need to understand that their Hybridcity—as artifact and idea—is the creation of public policy. …To make ours the greenest city will require a lot of greenwashing. Hybrids can be sterile, or they can flourish—the choice is yours.

Purpose: “A Terroir comes from the word terre “land”. It was originally a French term in wine, coffee and tea used to denote the special characteristics that the geography, geology and climate of a certain place bestowed upon particular varieties.” (Source Wikipedia)

Manifesto (edited)

Know where your food has come from through knowing those who produced it for you, from farmer to forager, rancher or fisher to earthworms…

Know where your food has come from by the very way it tastes: its freshness telling you how far it may have traveled…

Know where your food has come from by ascertaining the health & wealth of those who picked & processed it, by the fertility of the soil that is left in the patch where it once grew, by the traces of pesticides found in the birds & the bees there…

Know where your food comes from by the richness of stories told around the table recalling all that was harvested nearby?during the years that came before you…

Know where your foods come from by the patience displayed while putting them up, while peeling, skinning, coring or gutting them, while pit-roasting, poaching or fermenting them, while canning, salting or smoking them, while arranging them on a plate for our eyes to behold.

When you know where your food comes from you can give something back to those lands & waters, that rural culture, that migrant harvester, curer, smoker, poacher, roaster or vinyer.

Purpose: To celebrate the natural environment as a means to improving health and wellbeing.

Blue Gym Manifesto

Growing medical evidence shows that access to the natural environment improves health and wellbeing, prevents disease and helps people recover from illness. Experiencing nature in the outdoors can help tackle childhood obesity, coronary heart disease, stress and mental health problems. Adults who become more active halve their risk of dying early from heart disease. People using the natural environment keep active longer.

1) Blue Gym is a campaign with lots of different activities falling under its umbrella designed to get more people physically active using our coastal and inland waters.

2) The Peninsula Medical School is leading research activity in response to requests from regional health care professionals who are trying to find ways of combating the obesity epidemic and the increasing incidence of psychiatric disorders. It will hopefully provide new medical evidence to confirm the cost effective role the Blue Gym can play in tacking many current health & social challenges

3) Through it’s activities Blue Gym aims to help us become a healthier & happier nation.

Vancouver Manifesto: Greenest City in the World 2020

Targets for 2020

Green Buildings: Require all buildings constructed from 2020 onward to be carbon neutral in operations and to reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions in existing buildings by 20% over 2007 levels.

Green Transportation: Have over 50% of trips take place by walking, cycling and public transit. And, reduce motor vehicle kilometres traveled per resident by 20% from 2007 levels.

Zero Waste: Reduce solid waste going to the landfill or incinerator by 50% from 2008 levels.

Access to Nature: Ensure that every person lives within a 5-minute walk of a park, beach, greenway, or other natural space. And, plant 150,000 additional dares in the city between 2010 and 2020.

Clean Water: Meet the strongest of British Columbian, Canadian, and international drinking water quality standards and guidelines. And, reduce our per capita water consumption by 33% over 2006 levels.

Clean Air: Have the cleanest air of any major city in the world. And, meet the most stringent of British Columbian, Canadian and international air quality standards and guidelines.

Local Food: Increase city and neighbourhood food assets by a minimum of 50% over 2010 levels. That means increasing all residents’ access to food that is fresh and local, grown without harmful chemicals, and fairly produced and harvested.

Creator: E.O. Wilson is one of the world’s top Biologists, author, two time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and winner of the 2007 TED Prize.

Purpose: To build a networked encyclopaedia of all the world’s knowledge about life.

Encyclopedia of Life Manifesto

(Excerpt from the Ted Video)

I wish we would work together to help create the key tools that we need to inspire preservation of Earth’s biodiversity. And let us call it the “Encyclopedia of Life” – a concept that has already taken hold and is beginning to spread and be look at seriously. It is an encyclopaedia that lives on the internet and is contributed to by thousands of scientists around the world. Amateurs can do it also. It has an indefinitely expandable page for each species.

…The encyclopaedia will quickly pay for itself in practical applications. It will address transcendent qualities in the human consciousness, and sense of human need. It will transform the science of biology in ways of obvious benefit to humanity. And most of all, it can inspire a new generation of biologists to continue the quest that started, for me personally, 60 years ago: To search for life, to understand it and finally – above all – to preserve it. That is my wish. Thank you.

Purpose: Because “…we love clouds and we’re not ashamed to say it and we’ve had enough of people moaning about them.” (Society home page).

The Cloud Appreciation Society Manifesto

WE BELIEVE that clouds are unjustly maligned and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them.

We think that they are Nature’s poetry, and the most egalitarian of her displays, since everyone can have a fantastic view of them.

We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it. Life would be dull if we had to look up at cloudless monotony day after day.

We seek to remind people that clouds are expressions of the atmosphere’s moods, and can be read like those of a person’s countenance.

Clouds are so commonplace that their beauty is often overlooked. They are for dreamers and their contemplation benefits the soul. Indeed, all who consider the shapes they see in them will save on psychoanalysis bills.

And so we say to all who’ll listen:Look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and live life with your head in the clouds!

Creator: Jeff Gailus, Journalist and Conversations and author of The Grizzly Blog.

Purpose: Highlight the need for Grizzly Bear conservation in North America.

The Grizzly Manifesto: In Defence of the Great Bear

The following is an extract from the authors blog (source below):

The grizzly bear, once the archetype for all that is wild, is quickly becoming a symbol of nature’s fierce but flagging resilience in the face of humanity’s growing appetite for natural resources — and of the difficulty our wealth-addicted society has in changing its ways.

North America’s grizzlies survived the arrival of spear-wielding humans 13,000 years ago, outlived the short-faced bear, the dire wolf and the sabre-tooth cat—not to mention mastodons, mammoths and giant ground sloths the size of elephants—but a growing wave of urbanization and industrialization continues to push the Great Bear further north and west, just as it has since Europeans arrived in its home 400 years ago.

Despite their relatively successful recovery in Yellowstone National Park, the bears’ decline in Canada continues largely unchecked. The front line in this centuries-old battle for survival has shifted to western Alberta and southern BC, where outdated mythologies, rapacious industry and disingenuous governments continue to push the Great Bear into the mountains and toward a future that may not have room for them at all.